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Originally Posted by Igzy
Saying we should experience Christ is like saying we should eat food... when you do eat you eat some specific items of food: meat, bread, fruit etc. But that doesn't imply that saying "we should eat food" is wrong or dangerous. I mean, strictly speaking there's no food. There are just apples and dates and beef and tomatoes, etc. Therefore it's wrong to say we should eat food. That's what OBW's argument sounds like to me. It just sounds silly in the light of common sense.
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The problem here is that here we trust our common sense, just like once we trusted WL. Both are suspect: we remain in the flesh of sin, with a fallen soul, and its ideational outputs. Our mental constructions are ephemeral at best, and delusional at worst. There may indeed be food, and the experience of eating food. Likewise, there is Christ (Jesus, the Nazarene, who died and rose again), and there is the experience of Christ (for the obedient believer who endures in the faith).
Ontologically speaking, therefore, we may posit the existence of a thing called "the experience of Christ". But I caution that if we pay any undue attention to this thing, we get nothing, because it's merely a mental construction. We must pay attention to Christ. The so-called "experience of Christ" was constructed by WL to sell books and cassette tapes and so forth. It was mere merchandise, just as we the buyers became. Our only "experience" was to get fleeced (pun intended). And, Christ Himself paid no attention to the experience of Christ. Rather, Christ paid full attention to the Father. If He didn't pay attention to the experience of Christ, why should we?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Igzy
I understand a reaction to Lee and urging caution about misinterpreting the concept of experiencing Christ. I get that. I don't get trying to stretch it into some kind of case that the Bible doesn't support the general idea of experiencing Christ. That's just being too cute by half. Actually more than half.
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I may be too cute by half, and perhaps got up yesterday with a strange urge to be combative, which was activated by reading the back-and-forth on this thread. But it seemed to me that OBW was being sensible.
Anyone who goes to the church meeting and says they're 'experiencing Christ' is not. Some, conversely, may indeed experience Christ, but they are not paying attention to that. Rather, they're paying full attention to Christ. Similarly, we may say there's such a thing as the church, right? But when we gathered, WL got us distracted away from Christ by a mental construct: he gave us "the church"; we got The Normal Church, the Church Life, the Ground of the Church, and the Body of Christ, the Fourth Member of the Trinity (I kid you not). We cried, "Hallelujah for the church!" But we forgot about Christ; Nee and Lee got us to look away, and Brothers Wee told us that we were in an ontological entity they called "The Church". In fact it was no more the ontological entity "the church" than the RCC or any other human organization.